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A Flurry Of OSS ATI Driver Improvements

02-28-2008, 08:20 AM

Phoronix: A Flurry Of OSS ATI Driver Improvements

Since AMD openly released the R300-R500 3D programming documents this past Friday, it has led to a flurry of improvements with the xf86-video-ati "Radeon" driver. On the same day as the document release, Textured Video for the R100-400 series was committed to master followed by Textured Video for the R500 series the next morning (and Rotate support as well)...

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I think thats not so good when the old drivers are split, it was easy to detect ati for a while -> just vendor ati -> ati driver, now you have to update autodetection, nothing I really like...

i think this was done since the new code couldn't run well on older boards it's better to split the drivers and let that boards still run instead of having them going through the problems they have with fglrx.

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i think this was done since the new code couldn't run well on older boards it's better to split the drivers and let that boards still run instead of having them going through the problems they have with fglrx.

The drivers for mach64, r128 and radeon were always separate drivers, they just all lived in the same tree and were loaded by the ati "wrapper". We've split them to clean up the source tree and allow each driver to release on it's own schedule.

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I've a question in mind since those specifications have been released by ATI : would it possible to write specifically optimized drivers for a particular app ?

For example, I believe that what differs an ATI-FIREGL from an ATI "gamer" GFX Card are mainly the drivers, which are "optimized" for 3DStudio or Maya.
I know that the dev team has probably hard times to write the first open-source driver, but would it be possible to finally have drivers specifically tweaked for UT3 or for Quake Wars or Blender ?

I don't know much things in programming, but just wondering if that could be possible after the open-source drivers have been stabilized ?
We could also imagine the possibility to use the generic open-source driver when running Gnome/KDE and using this specificaly tuned driver on a new X terminal when starting the application for which the driver has been tuned, so that on everyday use we still can use the normal driver and switch to the optimize one only on the specific app.

Please, don't take this as an offense in a way that writing the first open-source ATI driver is already an huge job, that just to know if someone else has already had the idea and to know if this idea is completely crazy or just little crazy !